21C Magazine was a magazine originally run by The Commission,a government body in Australia, and the magazine was funded accordingly. After two previous editors, Ashley Crawford worked under the government structure editing the magazine from 1990-93 in that version and even then, although it had a strong Australian flavor, it was beginning to tackle cyberspace, information overload, virtual reality etc.

In 1994 Crawford was approached by a Swiss-based international company, Gordon & Breach, who wanted to start an international art magazine – World Art. Crawford accepted but didn’t really want to let go of 21C and so organized a take-over of the magazine. Accordingly Crawford ended up editing and publishing a revised version of the title from 1994 to 1999. Given 21C was suddenly international in scope, Crawford made the most of it and approached folk she had been a fan of for some time, amongst them such people as J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Mark Dery, Andrew Ross, R.U. Sirius, Claudia Springer, McKenzie Wark, Darren Tofts, Michael Moorcock, Thurston Moore, Erik Davis and others.

The earlier version of the magazine extremely parochial with a strong Australian flavor. The format and structure changed entirely in 1994. The earlier version had a strong socio-political flavor whereas the second version, while maintaining some of that eg; covering Noam Chomsky, tended towards the more speculative. The posthuman, cyberpunk etc.

The newer material tends to be going weirdly post-cyber. Where once it was replicants and cyborgs later it seems to be zombies. Where once it was the glittering on-line (albeit wonderfully gritty) world of Neuromancer and Snow Crash, later it seems to be the blasted wilderness of Cormac McCarthy, Brian Evenson and Brian Conn or the strange, fantastical but distinctly visceral rituals of Ben Marcus or Matthew Derby.

The DJ Spooky combo came about when a long-term 21C contributor, Mark Dery, invited Crawford on-board as executive editor of a magazine he’d taken editorship of called Artbyte in New York in 2001 shortly after 21C had died in its print-form. Dery had fantastic ambitions for Artbyte but unfortunately the publisher was, to say the least, eccentric.

Paul was an contributor to Artbyte. When 21C died he asked if Crawford would be happy for him to try and get it running on-line. But of course Paul’s busily running around the world being DJ Spooky and simply couldn’t put the energy into it to do anything but maintain a fairly token presence, but did release a few online issues.